The January 22, 2007 New York Times article, “In Raw World of Sex Movies, High Definition Could Be a View Too Real,” by Matt Richtel, discusses the problems the adult film industry faces as it adopts new high-definition DVD technology, a format which reveals a level of detail that many porn-enthusiasts find too realistic for its own good. Though HD technology may not be as problematic for global media networks as it is for pornographers, there is nonetheless an important metaphorical connection between Debbie Does Dallas…Again (to be released on HD-DVD and Blue-ray in March, mark your calendars) and the Fox News Channel. Rather than extremely-detailed film formats exposing unsightly breast-augmentation scars and ill-placed pimples, the world is now faced with the problem of new technologies and media outlets – like Al Jazeera, embedded journalists, camera phones, and YouTube – which reveal, in “higher definition” than the traditional mainstream media had ever been able to supply, events from around the globe. The dignified, airbrushed fantasy of your daddy’s nightly news has been replaced by the nasty close-ups of an alternative 24/7 global news network controlled by “the enemy,” graphic internet video of Saddam Hussein’s execution, and Geraldo Rivera weeping as he holds a malnourished African-American baby in the New Orleans Superdome. Just as in porno, viewers are having a hard time adjusting to this new level of “real” – just ask the Sunnis spurred to anger by the sight of Hussein’s execution, which several years ago would have remained as invisible as Stormy Daniels’ razor burn. How will humanity react to a more raw view of world events, in which it is impossible to hide the sight of death, destruction, and devastation behind the smile of a newscaster sitting calmly behind his desk?

The social, political, and cultural implications of new HD-DVD technology are clearly profound, but the reaction of the adult film industry to the new format simultaneously reveals the limitations of supposedly “revolutionary” technologies of representation. Jean Baudrillard, the French cultural theorist, described the current era as one of “simulation,” in which representation displaces the very reality it depicts. Somewhere in a café in Paris he’s smiling as a new technology of representation (HD-DVD), seeking to represent reality more perfectly (at a higher level of detail), forces performers (porn-stars) to physically modify and mortify their bodies in order to look better “on-screen.” But this privileging of representation over reality, what Baudrillard termed “simulation,” may not be as toe-curlingly revolutionary as today’s techno-punks would like us to expect. The phenomenon described by the article is in fact a twisted simulation, because reality is being displaced by images that are themselves superseded by the rules of an older representation – the high-def simulation of HD is warped, on the level of the real via plastic surgery, to conform to the fantasies created by the norms of older technologies of representation. Before the era of high-definition DVDs, porn-stars’ imperfections were invisible. Now that they have been exposed to the light of HD, actors are forced to change physically in order to improve virtually, because viewers are used to seeing things through the lens of an older, more flawed, technology. Though HD may change the way people make and watch pornography, the norms established by older technologies of representation continue to haunt the format, forcing it to look less real and more traditional even as it strives to copy reality more perfectly and revolutionize the erotic experience. Though time may decide this tension between the norms established by older forms of representation and the revolutionary power of modern formats in favor of the new technologies, there is no denying the importance of the residue left on our perceptions by past technologies of representation. Even as YouTube, cell phone videos, Al Jazeera, and other new media outlets and technologies change media and create new ways of viewing, they continued to be constrained – through viewer expectations, perceptions, and the limits of their creators’ own imaginations – by the norms established by traditional mainstream media. Our world of infinite source material to which all people have instant and unfettered access cannot just yet escape the spirit of Walter Cronkite. The implications of new media technology, immense in some ways, smaller in others, are best described, for now, as unbalanced.

I actually had read this article before it was assigned in class, and mentioned it to a few of my friends. They had all already seen it and read it. I suppose the words “raw” and “sex” jump out at you when they’re in a New York Times headline. Sexuality is obviously an essential part of the human experience, and the ways in which cultures relate to sex is often used as a standard of judgment by anthropologists, critical theorists, and religious zealots. For anyone who thought Jean Baudrillard was a nutcase (I admit, I’ve been on the fence about him), reading an article about how viewers find the sex portrayed by HD “too real looking” makes you think twice about what he wrote. Of course, watching sex is very different from having sex – hopefully, viewers who object to the imperfections revealed by HD don’t have the same problem when they’re with their partners in real life. Then again, if, as video gains even higher levels of detail and becomes even harder to distinguish from reality, it continues to copy the fantasy of how things looked on-screen in the past, we may one day find that people prefer experiencing sex through super-HD porn with super-physically modified stars rather than in real, imperfect, life.